Romanian palatalized consonants: A perceptual study
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.36505/ExLing-2006/01/0050/000050Abstract
Most consonants in the Romanian inventory are claimed to have a surface palatal-ized counterpart carrying functional meaning; it is not clear, however, whether the set of palatalized consonants is represented underlyingly. The present study investi-gated the perception of palatalized consonants based on two experiments. It was found that native speakers can discriminate between plain and palatalized segments, but sensitivity to palatalization decreases when another morphological cue is pre-sent. It was further confirmed that the primary place of articulation affects percepti-bility. This situation is intriguing from a representational perspective, since neither phonemic nor allophonic status in the sense of a classical analysis can fully describe the behavior of these consonants.
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Copyright (c) 2006 Laura Spinu (Author)
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Articles are published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are properly credited.
